What wonders move and migrate through this extraordinary film. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes – a major achievement not just for Thai cinema, but for the avant-garde world from which it emerges. Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, it’s an exquisitely composed, beautifully shot and unfathomably deep miracle show that takes as its starting point the return home to the countryside of an old man who’s dying of kidney failure. He savours the trees, his bees, this landscape that has formed him. His children visit him and, one evening, as they all dine together, spirits arrive at their table: that of his wife who died 14 years earlier, and of his long-lost son who appears in the form of a laser-eyed monkey ghost. This is a film, flecked with tiny reminders of north-east Thailand’s violent history in recent decades, about attachments and consolations, about love and loving. It speaks a cinematic language all of its own making.

2.The Clock

Better known as a sound artist, director Christian Marclay has created a 24‑hour-long film that excerpts and re-edits thousands of existing films in which a wristwatch or clock is shown telling the time. It’s a dazzlingly constructed reinvention of the city-symphony film that also proposes a completely new way of seeing cinema.

3.White Material

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Isabelle Huppert is incandescent as a divorced woman trying to keep alive a coffee plantation in an unnamed African country as civil war violence gets closer and closer. Dripping with tension and rich in ambiguity, like a modern-day version of a Conrad novel, it’s another towering work from the brilliant film-maker, Claire Denis.

4.The Headless Woman

Part-thriller, part-social satire in the spirit of Luis Buñuel, this is a mesmerising portrait of a middle-aged dental clinician who has an accident in which she runs over a dog and is concussed. Sensuous, clammy, elliptical, it’s an engrossing and utterly singular work by Lucrecia Martel about being adrift in modern Argentina.

5.The Illusionist

It seemed like an eternity since Sylvain Chomet’s previous film, Belleville Rendezvous. But the wait was worth it. This was another wholly enchanting work of genius in the shape of a hand-drawn animation about a conjurer who heads to Edinburgh in the late Fifties.

In a terrific year for animation, this Australian claymation picture written and directed by Adam Elliot felt like a left-field version of 84 Charing Cross Road. At once slightly gross and very sweet, it portrays the penfriendship between a middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger’s (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and an eight-year-old girl (Toni Collette) from Melbourne.

7.Scott Pilgrim v the World

It was a near-impossible task to compress all 1,200 pages of this cult Korean-Canadian comic book series about a slacker who must slay the seven evil exes of his beloved into one film. But Edgar Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead – helped by Michael Cera’s impeccable delivery – created an endearing if commercially underperforming piece of pop-cult zinginess.

This was hands down 2010’s best documentary. Lixin Fan has created an understated, yet deeply moving portrait, set during the lunar New Year, about the world’s greatest migration: the 130 million workers who return from China’s industrial cities to their rural homes. It’s an epic story told with rare tenderness.

9.Ivul

Maverick film-maker Andrew Kotting returned with a characteristically insidious drama about a teenage boy who lives off the ground for months after getting kicked out of home. Excellent sound design and atmospheric archival footage make this a rich, peaty exploration about exile and improvisation, about resistance and release.

10.Exit Through the Gift Shop

Was this account of fan boy Thierry Guetta’s obsession with graffiti culture another hoax by Banksy? Full of whimsy, manic energy, endless cuteness: the Frenchman could be a character in a Michel Gondry film. But as a celebration of a now commodified art form this was a very funny and very clever joy.